This video is worth a listen. Jordan Peterson talks about how the US military does not induct anyone with an IQ of 83 or less, which means the bottom 10%. This is the case despite the fact that the military really wants to hire anyone it has use for. It is not easy to get people to enlist even during peacetime.
He further states that since it is reasonable to conclude that the US military is as complex as the rest of society (it employs about two million people) and hence it stands to reason to conclude that the rest of society has very little use for the bottom 10%, either.
These figures are valid for today's society. The situation is getting progressively worse with increasing automation and AI growing in sophistication.
Cryptocurrency to the rescue?
The problem is someone or something will have to give it value. Network effect? What good is the network effect of people who have nothing to give from a financial point of view?
The cryptocurrency space has so far been entirely supported by exceptionally dovish monetary policies. Bitcoin is a macro asset whose value is derived from its scarcity backed up by a massive decentralized global computer network not controlled by a single entity. It's a savings technology used by individuals and corporations to conserve wealth in the face of accelerating money printing. Apart from providing liquidity to liquidity pools on decentralized exchanges, DeFi is all about pointless yield farming at this stage. The rest of the space is valuable because it oscillates more or less in sync with Bitcoin, which gives it speculative value. There is not much more value to it. If the Hive ecosystem were a business venture controlled by a single company, it would've gone bankrupt years ago owing to its inefficiency.
Let's say structural unemployment reaches 80% by 2045. This is not an unrealistic assumption given the exponential development of technology. While I agree that a decentralized social network like Hive can well function as distribution mechanism, the value being distributed will have to come from somewhere. That is, the tokens being distributed will, by some mechanism, have to entitle their holders to exchange them for the fruits of an extremely advanced productive economy. The key question is what that mechanism would be. Why would the owners of the full automated economy give anything to the masses who play no part in making that production possible or hold no ownership rights to them? I don't see any other alternatives than charity or taxation. Territorial monopolies of violence will have to force the ultra-wealthy elite to give up some of the production to the masses or they will have to do that voluntarily.
To rely on charity to keep the needs of 80% of humanity met sounds extremely foolish to me. One cursory look at history proves how vicious we can be when we perceive ourselves to be superior to another group of humans.
Conclusion
In my personal opinion, it would be best to construct some sort of a decentralized mechanism that does not rely on politics to redistribute the value generated by extremely advanced technologies. It would have to rely on force at some point, which means the government as a monopoly of violence cannot be allowed to go away. Only control over it will have to be much more decentralized that it currently is.
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